I have a Samsung drive which should be 250GB. lsblk is suggesting that the drive is 960MB. Furthermore, there's no partition table. I try to create one with fdisk, creating a new partition which fills the disk, of type Linux, but I get an Input/Output error. When I enter fdisk, I see "device does not contain a recognised partition table. Created a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier ...". If I try to give the drive a filesystem with mkfs.ext4, I again get an input/output error.

On my Mint system, in Disks, I am told that the drive is 1.0GB, and the assessment is "Disk is OK, one bad sector".

I believe that this drive was functioning correctly before. I find the incorrect sizing pretty strange, but coupled with the bad sector feel that perhaps the drive has just failed? Does my approach above seem reasonable? How might I go about troubleshooting the drive further?

Thanks

Is the drive internal or external? Regular hard drive or SSD?

Try running SMART (smartctl -a /dev/sdx replace x with the actual device ID). Check the values to see if it is failing.

Not all USB drives are supported. Its the USB bridge not the physical drive...

It's an internal SSD. I'll give that a go and get back to you thanks

Another thing you can try: Nuke the first 10MB or so, then try formatting it again:

I would reckon that your drive is in seriously bad shape. Backup what's left of whatever you have on it, as all the testing suggested is likely to test it to death.

SSDs are not platters; they are best thought of as memory chips, and the omens are very bad. I would like to be wrong, but you'll tell us.